A MOST venerable relic--none more so in London--is the Domesday Book, which I was allowed to inspect one day while sauntering through the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. This hoary volume is called the "Domesday Book," or, "Register of the Lands of England," and was made in the year 1086, almost in the morning of English history. There are two volumes of the "Domesday Book," one being a folio and the other a quarto. A fee of a shilling is charged strangers, to inspect the musty old tomes, with their illuminated characters, which detail the various "messuages," "folkmotes," "carucates," and "hydes," of land, which were divided among Norman William's mail clad barons, by right of conquest, nearly a thousand years ago. These volumes are the oldest in England, although I have been informed that there are, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, two books, in Greek characters, which were saved from the destruction of the Alexandrian Library in the Ninth Century. [Sidenote: THE DREADNOUGHT.] One of the Domesday volumes is a very large folio, the other is a quarto. The quarto is written on 382 double pages of vellum, in one and the same hand, in small but plain characters, each page having double columns. Some of the capital letters and principal pages are touched with black ink, and others are crossed with lines of red ink. The second volume, in folio, is written in 450 pages of vellum, but in single columns, occupying each page, and in a large, fair character. At the end of the second volume is the following memorial, in capital letters, of the time of its completion: "Anno Millesimo Octogesimo Sexto ab Incarnatione Domini, vigesimo vero regni Willielmi, facta est ista Descriptio, non solum per hos tres Comitatus, sed etiam per alios." These books, until the year 1696, or for over six hundred years, were carried innumerable times from place to place, through England, under strong guards, within the jurisdiction of the various Lord Chancellors, and Courts, to settle disputes and verify local records and documents, in regard to the transmission of real estate, for every acre of land owned to-day in England is held by the original tenure, given in Domesday Book.